Bruce Jenkins is a sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, where he has worked since 1973. He became a columnist in 1989, having worked mostly as a beat writer before that (a columnist has the freedom to write on more general topics and be more opinionated, while a beat writer works as a generally objective reporter for a specific team or area). He has also covered tennis for Sports Illustrated. His father was Gordon Jenkins, a giant in the music industry who worked with Frank Sinatra among others. In his career, Bruce Jenkins has had the enviable opportunity to attend and write about some huge events in the sports world, including: the World Series, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, the Olympics, the NBA Finals, the Super Bowl, the World Cup, and the Mavericks surf contest. He has twice been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He has also written multiple books, including one about big-wave surfing in Hawaii (North Shore Chronicles) and a memoir of his father (Goodbye: In Search of Gordon Jenkins). He graduated from Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1971, attending the university during a tumultuous but exciting time.
Growing up, I would spend hours sifting through the stacks of sporting greens from the SF Chronicle that my grandfather kept at his house, and the stories that I read there -- many of them by Bruce Jenkins -- played a major role in my desire to one day become a sports writer myself. On October 10th, I sat down to talk with Mr. Jenkins over the phone about his long, illustrious career and what his advice would be for prospective sports journalists after so much change has occurred in the industry.
What was your experience with sports growing up?
My father was a musician, and a very good one, and I didn’t really inherit his talent. He was also a big sports fan and took me to Dodgers, Lakers, and Rams games as I grew up in Southern California. Writing was always my strength in school, and I was a voracious reader of the excellent sports section of the Los Angeles Times and L.A. Herald Examiner. It’s really all I ever wanted to do, and from the time I hooked up with my middle-school newspaper -- the Lincoln Junior High Railsplitter -- it’s all I’ve ever done.
What was your experience like at Berkeley, attending at such an interesting time in the university’s history?
I was at Berkeley from the fall of 1966 through the spring of 1971. Wild, hectic times. I remember being on the 6th floor of Eshleman Hall, the Daily Cal office, hammering out a story while protests and/or rioting were taking place below.
[Video of People’s Park Protest in 1969 and National Guard Response]
I’m very liberal-minded and was always sympathetic to anti-war protests and everything having to do with civil and human rights. But I wasn’t an active protester. That’s not really my nature, and between my schoolwork, writing for the Daily Cal and working for the Sports Information Department, my time was always filled. In all, I wouldn’t have traded my Berkeley experience for anything. I look back at those years as a great time to be there. I loved being at Berkeley. I loved being at the center of things, the way people were out to change the world and it was changing -- that was a very influential time and I was happy to be there for that reason. I was also happy to be there because of the ethnic mix at Cal, every known race, color, and creed in great amounts, and I was just very comfortable in that environment.
Did all the social activism and discussion of societal issues at Berkeley bleed into your sports writing at all? Or did you kind of try and keep that separate?
No, I've never been too political. To this day I don't pay a lot of attention to it. My mom and dad were like that too, they were pretty fed up with all politicians and we didn't talk about it. I'm that way too. I've never really felt qualified to bring politics into my articles anyway and I've always felt more comfortable just sticking to sports as they say.
So would you say that sports is more of an escape from societal problems rather than a mirror to look at society or is it just personally you'd rather keep societal issues out of sports?
For me it’s not an escape, it's really all I do. I work all day on something or other, reading the internet, trying to stay current, writing a column, or working on a project. It's like my entire life is sports. For fans it's obviously a great escape -- for people who aren't thrilled with their jobs or their marriage or whatever it may be -- but for me it's kind of like life itself.
Was there a particular experience or something that you did at Cal that really helped you to become a sports writer?
First of all there was no real Journalism Department; you couldn’t major in journalism without declaring an individual major. You had to go in and make your case that that’s what you wanted to major in and I was able to do that. I don't really have any great memories of the classes I took in terms of a practical application to what it would mean to actually work in a newspaper but I worked in the Daily Cal and I traveled with the football team as a sports editor and I was with the baseball team all the years that I was there, just kind of getting an idea of what it's like to travel with athletes and work with them and establish relationships with them. Working for the Daily Cal I didn't have the kind of deadlines that I have now but it gave me some kind of basis for what it might be like, but the best newspaper training is pretty much on the job.
So, you talked a little bit about how your time at Cal helped you learn how to form relationships with players. What goes into forming those relationships?
Yeah my thing was I wasn't, and I’m still not, much of a schmoozer, where I wanted to hang out with athletes and go drinking with them and be friends with them. It sounds good, I just wanted to walk the line between where they trusted you but not that you were their friends so that you wouldn't write anything negative. I've never been interested in anyone's personal life or if they get into any kind of trouble unless they're on the police scanner, then it's public knowledge. I just wanted to be known as someone that was fair, that didn't mess with what I shouldn't be messing with and knew the game and that's what I've always just tried to do, just walk that line.
So after Cal how did you get your big break and get into the SF Chronicle?
The first job I had was at the Santa Monica Evening Outlook which was an evening paper that existed for many years that's no longer there. I'm from down there, I went to Santa Monica High School, and that was my first job out of Cal. In April ‘73, I heard from a guy named Al Moss who covered Cal Sports for The Chronicle while I was at Cal and got to know him a little bit. He kind of liked my stuff and The Chronicle needed someone to work 8 or 9 months as a vacation replacement for the writers who were going on vacation and he asked me if I wanted to do that and I said “Yes, terrific!” -- I always wanted to move back up to the Bay Area anyway. So in April ‘73, I took that job and did that for 3 years working pretty much 8 or 9 months straight at the desk and then they hired me full-time.
What it was like to be a beat writer -- to be so close with a team and share seasons with them?
I did that for most of the ‘80s and it was really fantastic. Back then writers traveled with the team -- we were on the buses, we were on the flights, we were in the same hotel. On a road trip you would grab your suitcase and take it to the clubhouse before the last game of the homestand and you wouldn’t have to see it again until you checked into the hotel. It was incredibly convenient and a really great way to get to know the guys. Not like super chummy, just to ask them things related to the games -- just like casual conversations to let them know you're a decent guy. You do that enough and it pays off when there’s something like the team takes a horrible loss and the team is just devastated and the locker room is deathly quiet but you've built up relationships with these guys where that even in that ugly situation you can go up and ask them something, where as if you just came up from nowhere they would just say “Get the hell out of my face I don't really want to talk to you.” Unfortunately that went away as the players reached the point where they didn't really want the writers around. It started in the late ‘80s to turn away from that. Now beat writers book their own flights and everything else. I was really fortunate to be part of that old scene. It was a little bit dangerous ‘cause the newspaper always wondered if we were getting too close like, “They're taking such good care of you, are you going to be able to be fair with your stuff,” but I always felt that I was. I covered good teams and bad and if they're going bad you're going to write how bad they are and if they're great you're going to write it that way but the traveling to me that was just invaluable and I feel sorry a little bit for the people today who don't have that.
Did you kind of feel almost like a fan of the team as you covered them or did you try and remain objective?
No, never a fan because a fan can get irrational and not see things clearly or get hysterical when things go wrong. I've known where certain writers are such fans of teams that they wouldn't be allowed to cover that team because they're just too much of a fan. I'm an enormous fan of the games, of the sports but not so much of the teams. As we say in sports writing, we root for stories, not for the teams but for personal story. Or sometimes you root for a city like, “I sure hope New York gets in and not Kansas City” and stuff like that. Just sort of rooting privately to yourself but never as an outright fan.
What drew you to switch from a being beat writer to becoming a columnist?
Well it was a little bit of a strange situation. I've always been into surfing because I'm actually from Malibu. I grew up there and I went to Hawaii every winter, to the north shore of Oahu, where sort of the mecca surfing was. In February of ‘86, I was staying out there and I was hit by a rogue wave, which is like two giant waves coming together, separate wave trains coming together as one. Basically this avalanche of whitewater hit the little bungalow that I was staying in and completely destroyed it -- no one could believe that I made it alive out of there. I was almost untouched. It was almost like I was in a washing machine inside the room as the waves laid waste to my bungalow and completely destroyed it. So I'm sitting in the aftermath and thinking, “I've been granted a second life here -- I shouldn't really be here” and “What's it going to be?” I said, “I’ll do one more year on the beat and then I want to do something else.” I didn't want to drop it cold turkey when they were counting on me to do it, so I covered the ‘86 baseball season -- little bit of Giants little bit of A's -- and then I asked off the beat to write general stuff and that was in ‘87. Then in ‘89 I got the column. So that's a little bit unusual, but I was starting to get a little bit weary of the travel anyway so that sort of just planted a different seed in my head.
I've noticed that you’ve covered a wide array of sports -- you've covered basketball, tennis, baseball, football, soccer, even the Olympics. Did you have a natural level of comfort with all these sports or was it something that you had to work on and develop?
Baseball was very natural because that's always been my favorite sport -- it was my favorite sport to write and I played my whole life recreationally. Same with tennis and basketball. Football, I never played and I do college football, but I haven't covered the NFL in decades really. I'm familiar with the game but I never quite liked covering it so much. There's not enough games. I'm used to covering a game everyday and it's just too much B.S. to get through the week before you get to a game. Soccer I wasn't familiar with at all. I first saw it played in England in April of ‘73 right before I got hired at The Chronicle and I really got hooked on it. I followed it for years before I really felt comfortable writing anything about it but I had a great trip through Europe in the summer of ‘98 where I did Wimbledon, The British Open (golf), and then the semifinals and the finals of the World Cup. I still don't consider myself a big aficionado in terms of strategy and everything that goes into soccer, but I do love it and I think you can write about it in a way where you don't have to be necessarily a technician. So yeah, I played all the sports in season when I was a kid and and this doesn't really make you familiar with professional sports but I do know how hard the games are and how they're supposed to be played -- stuff like that.
What is it like to experience the game as a writer in person and what is your process when you're attending a game?
It's really invigorating and I still feel that way. I still get excited about going to games and watching them and writing about them. I very rarely go into any event with a preconceived notion of what I'm going to write because usually I like to write about what people are talking about the next morning or late that night if they’re reading online. Generally what they're talking about is what happened in the game and it puts you under a lot of pressure for a deadline but I really thrive on that. That's one of my strengths over the years. I'm very fast on the keyboard and I don't just really block out when I write. It's kind of all I do -- I'm glad I'm good at something. I can crank things out. It's really invigorating to be driving home and hope you didn't screw something up, as of course we all do, but I like the pressure of deadline writing.
So you just go in basically blank slate?
Yeah pretty much. I read as much as I can about everything that I'm going to be covering, including the other team and I’m very current that way. I spend a lot of time printing stuff out that I think I'd want to read and I read it in the evenings so I go in with a lot of information. But there's no column thought there unless there's something just brewing. So, I have a lot of background that I can rely on depending on what happens.
What draws you to a story?
People and not stats. Some very good writers that I know always say, “Write the humanity, write about the people.” Stats are cool and I like stats and everything but I kind of fall asleep reading stories that are full of stats. I try to focus on people's stories, the emotion that goes into winning and losing, and how do people react to both of those things and not fill ‘er up with too many numbers.
I've noticed recently that sports writing has become full of analytic numbers. Do you use numbers like this at all and if so do you have any tips for incorporating them so they don't draw away from the story of humanity?
I've always been wary of using the most up-to-date stats or even something like W.A.R because I don't really think most fans are thinking along those lines -- I don't think they're thinking like that. Probably the younger fans are and I'm missing that. I don't want to have the reader going, “You're losing me here” with stats. To me, I’m more comfortable with conventional stats like points per game, rbis, yards per carry -- stuff like that, that's been part of sports writing forever and part of the lexicon of sports fans. Just because I resist filling it up with numbers, I certainly don't doubt the veracity or the value of modern metrics at all. Sometimes I’ll read about that just for enjoyment, just to see how they’re interpreting things that are going on but I generally avoid it in print possibly because of my age but that’s just the way I look at it.
How did you develop your own distinct style as a writer?
It took a while to be comfortable with a voice. I try to be sort of conversational instead of trying to craft something perfectly grammatical [Here’s an example of one of Bruce Jenkins’ stories, this one on Cal’s upset of Washington State last year]. I try to talk to the reader like I'm talking to friends, sports-wise friends, just in a relaxed setting. That's kind of a vague way of putting it but sort of like writing a letter or talking to somebody. As you're reading it back to yourself, it should sound good, it should sound rhythmic, it doesn't sound confusing, you don't leave people hanging necessarily, there's a flow to it, a rhythm. I guess I would look at it that way.
I've heard a lot of sports journalist say that to develop your voice you should read the work of others. What do you look for when you're reading the work of your peers or people you admire?
That's been a big influence. Jim Murray was probably the greatest sports writer of them all -- the late Jim Murray. I actually knew him and his family growing up but he was all about writing about the humanity in sports. I don't know if he ever used any stats. And Dan Jenkins -- unbelievable humorist. I'm not really a humorist but I just really love the way those guys write. Scott Ostler is another great humorist as well and he has a very comfortable writing style. I've always been drawn to that kind of writing not something terribly flowery, without words that you have to stop and look them up, more of a conversational style.
[links to selected stories by Jim Murray and Dan Jenkins added by the interviewer -- JM]
You’ve obviously witnessed a lot of change in the sports journalism industry. Has the internet and changes in technology changed your approach to writing and covering sports?
Yeah unbelievably so. Especially for beat writers. For years you would write something and they'll be three or four other papers on the scene and you’re all hoping to just outshine, to out-scoop the other one and you didn't really know what anyone else was up to and you'd wake up in the morning and go, “Oh my God the Tribune had this” or “I'm happy with what I did here” and now you know it instantly. Right when the thought strikes somebody, it’s on Twitter. So he might have put it there first but you’re no longer in the dark on that, you can start pursuing it yourself and it’s wild.
Another incredible thing is you have Google search. I used to have to do a lot of research for historical pieces, and oh my God talk about an asset. You know how that works. I mean compared to before you used to have a book that you hope will answer your questions and you'd have to travel around with like six different reference books and I could barely lift my bag. Now you don't need any of that, you just Google it and you're in.
One other thing is that there's a big push for online content now and it's very dangerous, because as opposed to having 3 hours or something to write a story, where you have time to tinker around with it, [now] if they want something posted online right away on something that just happened and you hammer out a few paragraphs you hope you're right -- you hope you don't make a stupid error. It's all of the sudden up there -- you can take it down but you like it to be accurate. I'm sure you've had some times where stuff is tweeted out or written online that is simply not true -- I mean people have been declared dead when they're still alive, stuff like that. That's a big change.
What do you think we have lost with the decline of newspapers? It’s still really good writing obviously but it has lost a lot of its audience.
Yeah it has. Years ago when BART first came into play, you’d see (in the morning especially) the majority of people holding up a newspaper and reading it. You very rarely see that anymore. I think that print subscribers are older folks, used to holding that paper and that's the way they want to do it but we've lost an awful lot of advertising because people are more interested in online than in print. I mean the travel budget has been severely cut -- you probably read that bio, I did all that stuff, for years I could do all those things and stay in good hotels and not have to take a connecting flight and not really worry about all that stuff and now I don't really go anywhere unless it's related to the Giants or the A's or The Warriors. We’re never sending anyone to Wimbledon, we don't do the Masters anymore -- stuff like that. So that makes me glad that I was in the business as long as I have been where I could do all those things. At this point I'm not that really crazy about traveling all over the place anyway but for a young writer coming up with the newspaper thinking, “Gee, I'd sure like to do the Kentucky Derby someday or the Indy 500 or the NBA Finals” -- that's really not going to happen unless your local team is involved.
When you were getting your start was there a particular piece of advice that you got that stuck with you?
I think I mentioned it already but as I mentioned Jim Murray was a great legendary sports writer that I knew a little bit and he would say, “Write the humanity. Write something about the people.” I heard that from him, I heard that from Frank Deford a great Sports Illustrated writer -- he didn't tell me directly but I remember reading something from him about that. Bill Plaschke, the LA Times columnist, talked about an English Professor that he had when his kid said, “Write the people -- Tell stories don't just cite statistics.” I think that's the best advice anyone can have unless they're going to write an analytics column, and if that's something you want to do then do it, but if you want to hit a wider audience (and to me it’s much more interesting) get into the humanity of things.
Is there something that people don't think about when they're getting into sports writing that they should know?
I think it's pretty straightforward what the job entails. You have to have your head on straight -- don't barge in trying to be super radical with radical opinions trying to shake up the town, thinking, “I'm going to show all these old crusty writers how it's done.” I've seen that happen and you don't really get anywhere that way -- you have no friends in the business because somebody like that tends to be an irrational way to go about it. It alienates athletes as well if you’re writing all this sensational stuff like “Fire Bochy”or “Get rid of this guy” or “This guy sucks.” That's just not very smart -- I mean you can do it if you really feel that way but it's better to be a little more measured. If you do come out with a strong opinion, make sure it's backed up with some substance. It can be certainly not liked or appreciated but it can be respected by the athletes that you’re talking about.
Do you think new sports writers coming in brash and trying to shake up things without much substance behind their claims comes from the rise of television in the industry, with shows like First Take for example?
Yeah and also speaking of television, people can know what happened in sports before they go to bed and you may not be breaking any big news to them. I think some people want to be a little sensational by slapping a controversial headline on a controversial column -- you're going to get some readers, just to by doing something that people don't know and I get that. What I like to do, to give people something they don't know, is to offer some insight into an event or the people or something that not everyone thought about in their initial reaction to a game or news event, to just give a little perspective or insight.
Any stories or moments in your career that you’re most proud of?
I was really fortunate to do the Barcelona Olympics in ‘92. I just decided I was going to go completely nuts with the time difference. You have lots of time to write and all kinds of events. More often than not in those 16 days I wrote three columns -- they weren't all presented that way. They were three features or columns or commentary on three different sports everyday and I was going absolutely crazy and getting very little sleep. I mean, they nominated me for a Pulitzer Prize which was a little over-the-top but I was happy that somebody noticed and that was very, very invigorating.
